


The Unfortunate Flour Incident

by liminalshadow



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir and Food, Baking, Bread, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26224177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalshadow/pseuds/liminalshadow
Summary: When Chat Noir and Marinette have a bread baking date, an unfortunate flour incident forces a conversation that they wasn't quite ready to have.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 11
Kudos: 126
Collections: August 2020 - Exchange





	The Unfortunate Flour Incident

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MarinetteAgresteBrand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarinetteAgresteBrand/gifts).



> This is for MarinetteAgresteBrand, who requested something of a surprise. Hope this surprises you!
> 
> Thanks to [sagansjagger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagansjagger/works) for some help defining the story and beta reading it for me.

"Wake up, Marinette," Tikki called out. "Chat will be here soon." 

"Ugg." Marinette turned over and lifted her head. "Tikki, what time is it?" 

"It's ten. Chat is coming by in thirty minutes. You don't want to be in your pajamas do you?" 

Marinette blinked a couple times before sitting up suddenly. "It's ten!? Why didn't you wake me!" She jumped out of bed and started pulling on some clothes. 

Tikki just shook her head. "What do you think I was doing?" The little kwami set out to help her holder get ready before darting into a drawer just as there was a knock at the door.

"Marinette? Chat's here." Sabine's voice sounded from behind the door.

"I'll be there in a minute, Maman," Marinette said. She hastily pulled back her hair, and ran down the stairs to see her parents showing Chat how to tie on an apron. He, of course, was grinning madly. 

Tom clapped him on the back. "We'll be back if you need us, cupcake. You take care of our new apprentice here. We'll bring around lunch in a couple hours."

“Papa! It’s only the first time," Marinette said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. "Let's make sure he likes it before we start calling him an apprentice." That drew a chuckle from her parents, but they took their leave and went to go run the store. She took a breath as her parents left the room and turned to face her date for the morning. "Hi, Chat," she said, "glad you could make it." She gave him a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek as well. 

"Of course, Marinette, I've been looking forward to this all week." He was still grinning. "You make the best croissants; I can't wait to learn." 

"We'll, we're going to start pretty simple," she said with a giggle. "How do you feel about baguettes?"

"Aww," Chat said, giving her his sad kitten eyes. "But I really want to make croissants."

"I'll tell you what," Marinette said. "If you make a baguette with me today, we'll make some croissants next week." She paused for a moment, a mischievous grin tugging at her lips. "And if you behave, maybe I can dig out some croissants for you for lunch." 

"Deal!" Chat said. "So, what do we do first?"

"First, I need an apron. Otherwise I'm going to end up covered with flour — don't give me that look, I know you — and then we can get started." She grabbed her apron off of the hook by the kitchen, and tied it on. "So the basics of bread are pretty simple. There are only four main ingredients: flour, water, yeast and salt." 

She disappeared into the pantry to grab a bag of flour, placing it on the counter, before pulling down containers of salt and a starter that they kept. "Everything else is just extra. Now, how warm are your hands?"

"My hands?" Chat looked confused. "Normal I guess."

"Here, let me see." She took his hands and closed her eyes for a second.

Marinette smiled as the warmth sunk into her fingers. "Mmm. Warm." Even the slight roughness of his gloves couldn’t take away from the moment.

"Little mouse?"

"Hmm?"

"How are my hands?" Chat's fingers tightened slightly around hers.

"They're great." She could get used to this. 

"So, does that mean we can get started?" Was he purring? He was definitely purring.

"Started with what?" 

"The bread."

"Oh!" She pulled her hands free and opened her eyes. "Umm." She blinked a few times, feeling her face heat up. "Oh, no." She covered her face with her hands, and turned away to hide her embarrassment.

"Marinette? Is everything okay?" Chat sounded concerned. He shuffled, as though he was going to take a step forward but seemed to think better of it.

"Yeah. Just. I'm sorry... I — I just... You ... hands."

"Yeah, was there something wrong with my hands?"

"No, no, you're fine. I just... got distracted."

"Oh. Oh!" He smiled. "Well, we can't have that can we." His grin should be illegal.

"It'll be fine," she said. "Your gloves are a little rough, and your hands run a little warm, but that's not unusual. We'll just have to make adjustments." She just needed to take a couple breaths.

"I didn't know that mattered," he said, staring at his hands. "What does that mean?"

"It's pretty simple, really," she said. "The dough really wants to be a specific temperature. Yeast is a living thing. If it gets too hot, or too cold, it gets uncomfortable, just like we do." She smiled. "Since we work the dough with our hands, we transfer a little of our body heat to the dough. So, we just need to adjust your dough so that it starts off a bit cooler than mine, so that it ends up at the right temperature at the end."

"Oh, that makes sense," he said. "How do we do that?"

"The water," she said. "Flour is pretty hard to change the temperature of, and yeast as I said is alive. But water is pretty easy to change, and so we'll just adjust it a bit."

"Got it, Princess. So where do we start?" He sat down and watched her. 

"We'll measure out our ingredients, and I'll get the water going." She gave him a recipe with the measurements, and started pouring the water into two containers. She labeled one with his name, and one with hers, carefully measuring the temperature of each. 

As she showed him to mix and knead the dough, she did indeed have to duck out of the way as he tried to get the dough in her hair. "Hey, I told you to keep that off of me!"

"Aww, what's wrong, Princess. Afraid to get dirty with the peasants?"

"I'm no timid princess like Chloe," Marinette retorted, "but that is going to get stuck in my hair for hours." She hit him in the chin with a glob of dough. "Much easier to get it out of skin."

"Oh, I see how it is," he said. "You're just too pretty to get any dough on you." The ensuing battle ranged all over the kitchen. He did manage to get her in the hair, but mostly they kept the mess to their clothing. Tikki hated it when she got dirty, so she could only assume Plagg was going to have a fit when Chat de-transformed at the end of this. She'd have to stash some cheese off to the side so that he'd have something to munch on while Chat tried to wash some of it off later. That's what Chat said his Kwami ate, right? 

As they slumped back against the cabinets, exhausted, she gave him a small push. "Why can't you be that good at dodging when the akuma are around?"

"Oh please, you hit me plenty of times. If you were an akuma, I'd be in big trouble. Besides, if this were an akuma fight, I'd have to keep Ladybug safe."

"You mean you'd have to keep each other safe." Marinette glared at him. "That's the whole point of having a partner. It's a two-way street you know. If you don't trust her to keep you safe, you'd better talk to her. I mean it, Chat."

"What!? How could you say that? She's just more important than me. You've seen the Ladyblog. We all know why they're there. Who cares about me? I see the comments. They just say I get in the way, or that I'm causing problems. The best thing I can do is get mind-controlled, or whatever."

"Whoever's saying that is an idiot," she said, more venom in her voice than even she expected. "I see you, Chat. And Ladybug does, too. We talk, you know. We talk about you, sometimes. It's hard to sit here. To watch you throw yourself in front of all the attacks. You get mind-controlled because you're making sure that she isn't. Why can't you just knock her out of the way? Or hit the akuma so that it shoots somewhere else? Sometimes there are other solutions, you know."

"Yeah? Maybe. In the moment, it's all I can think of. I'm just doing the most obvious thing, I guess. It's not like we have you there to help us. Maybe we should drag you back on the field."

She blushed at that. "Oh come on, Chat, you know why we can't do that."

"It's a stupid rule, little mouse," he said. "Ms. Mendeleiev was long gone. Nobody saw you but me. After Chloe, we need more help. Ladybug won't say it, but I know she's stressed out." His voice dropped. "I have this whole presentation on why we need you back."

"Chat Claude Charles Conrad Christopher Noir, you absolutely did not," Marinette seethed. "You did not put together a presentation about me."

"Did ... you just make up middle names for me?"

"No!" The lie was rather obvious. "But that's entirely besides the point. You made up a whole presentation! I was not that great. Besides, I messed up."

He shrugged. "You're not the only one. I've messed up. Ladybug's messed up. We've all messed up at one point or another. Other heroes have had their identities exposed to each other, and still fought. I'm surprised you haven't figured out my identity by now. I think we could have made an exception and still made a lot of progress. Besides, it's clear that you would be a really good fighter." He gestured to his dough-splattered appearance. "If you were an akuma, I'd be dead, and Ladybug would have been in a lot of trouble." His gaze tracked their fight around the room. "We didn't leave a lot of ground uncovered."

She followed his gaze, taking in the mess they had created. "This... is going to take a lot of work to clean up."

"That involves getting up doesn't it?"

"Yep." 

"Why don't you let me take care of it then. Stay here." 

He pulled himself to her feet and vanished around the corner. She heard him shuffling around the kitchen, moving the bowls and utensils that they had used to the sink. "Mari? Where does the flour go?"

"Back into the pantry," she called out. 

"Got it." 

She heard him grunt as he picked up the 22-kilo bag. "Heavier than it looks, isn't it?" she said.

"You must be as strong as an Ox, little mouse."

"You know it."

She had tilted her head back, and closed her eyes for just a moment when she heard his footsteps coming back. A smile tugged at her lips. She opened her eyes, ready to greet him when she was greeted with a shock of white hair, white mask. A white Chat Noir. Her breath caught in her throat and she let out a strangled scream as she ducked out from his extended arms and scrambled behind the counter. 

"Get away!" she yelled.

"Marinette?" He said. His voice sounded wrong, but the blood pounding in her ears was drowning out her ability to hear clearly. She couldn't think, she just ran. Up to her room. Tikki. She needed to get to Tikki.

* * *

She closed the door behind her, and her friend zoomed out to see her. "Marinette, take a breath. It's not an akuma." 

"Wh... .what?"

"I can sense it. It's not Chat Blanc." 

"Are... are you sure?"

"Positive. He's coming up now." She held her paws up to Marinette's face. "You're going to have to talk to him. Just breathe."

She dashed back into the clutch just as there was a knock at the door. "Princess? You okay in there?"

"One minute, Chat." She stared at herself in the mirror, trying to will herself to look less like she'd seen a ghost. It wasn't working. Shaking her head, she walked over to the door and opened it. "Sorry Chat. That... you shouldn't have seen that."

"Can… can I come in?" He stood in the doorway, rubbing the back of his neck. 

"Yeah, come in. Why don't you sit down." She stepped off to the side, gesturing to her chaise. 

"Okay." He took a seat, briefly flailing about moving his hands from one position to another, before settling on dropping them into his lap. 

“So, Listen— ” they both said at the same time. They stopped abruptly.

“I’m sorry for scaring you,” Chat said before she could say another word. “I thought it’d look silly, like when Jagged was on the show.” 

“You saw that?” Marinette said, dropping her face into her hands. This was a disaster. 

“I didn’t realize that would be a bad memory for you,” he said. “I’ll be more careful next time...we can do this again right? I didn’t mess up that badly?” He started to stand up.

“Oh no, Chat. That… that wasn’t it at all. This wasn’t your fault.” She hesitated, but he needed an explanation. She couldn’t let him leave like this. “ _Mightnare_ ,” she mumbled. “He plows up Baris. Blew up? Blowed up? How do you talk about the _future_ in the past? Past in the future? No wonder Fluff is scatterbrained. It’d drive anyone mad as a hatter. I only made **one** hat, and I’m already half mad. And _you had the white mask_. The flour. You looked _so_ much like him. Paris browned. Dust. I just… I couldn’t. You… he… I don’t…”

“Slow down Marinette,” Chat said. “You’re going to have to explain that a bit more.”

She was not ready for this. Why did Tikki leave her to have this conversation? Oh. Right. Because he couldn’t know she was Ladybug. “With all the flour all over you, you looked like Chat Blanc.” There. That was simple enough.

"Who's Chat Blanc?" 

One sentence at a time. "When you were akumatized." 

Marinette had seen him hit a lot. He’d been hit by akuma more times than she could count. She’d never seen him look so much like a kicked puppy. "But… but I've never been akumatized." 

"Not yet," she said. It was too much. She pulled her gaze away from his, hearing him get up and start pacing around the room. She stared down at her hands, wringing them as she tried to find the words to continue. "It was... in the future. Something happened, I don't know what. You became akumatized. He called himself Chat Blanc. He was… destroying everything. All of Paris was underwater. The moon was... shattered. It was _terrifying_."

“But I would never do that, you have to believe me!” At this rate, he would wear the finish off her floors, but that was the last thing on her mind. 

“I do believe you Chat. It wasn’t you. It was **him**. It was the akuma, it was Chat Blanc. Even Hawkmoth was dead. Even— ” She stopped. She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t tell him what he had done to her. The memory of touching her own hand, of seeing herself turn to dust flashed before her eyes and her vision blurred, the sound of his pacing melding with the pounding of her heart.

She felt his hand on her face before she became aware that she was in her room. Before she could hear him calling her name. “—arinette. Marinette, can you hear me?”

“Sorry. I…”

“Welcome back, little mouse. Are you okay?” Chat was there. He was there, and he was real, and she was back.

“Dust. He turned all of Paris to dust.” She could see the devastation on his face. She placed her hand over his, squeezing it, and let him lead them back to the chaise. Her legs were a little unsteady, but at least they could sit down. 

"So. Future... Why would Bunnix take you? How could she involve you in this?" He was fidgeting in his seat, his anxiety clear. 

Marinette froze. She suddenly realized what she had been saying. What she was admitting without thinking. If she wasn't careful, he was going to figure everything out. She scrambled for an answer. What could she tell him that he would believe. She hated to lie to him, but it wouldn't be the first time. "Not me." She said. "Ladybug." That seemed to relax him a little. "But we talked about it. She really needed someone when she got back."

"Oh." There was so much packed into that single syllable. Even as his fidgeting stopped, his own gaze dropped to his hands. He closed in on himself, withdrawing from her. Lonely.

"She wanted to tell you," she said quickly. "But, we didn't know what caused it. What if it was something she did? What if it was her? What if it was me?" She bit her lip. "We... we talked about it a lot. Trying to figure it out. She told me so much about it I guess... when I saw you I kind of panicked. It scared me. I'm sorry. We didn't want to worry you about it until we knew how to stop it."

"It's okay," he said. He put on a smile, but she could tell it was fake. He wasn't really fooling her, but it was enough. It was what she needed to see right in that moment. "I'm going to be okay, alright? I promise."

"That's why I need you to take better care of yourself," she said. She hesitated for only a moment, before she threw her arms around him. "We need you here. **I need you here**. Just promise me. _Promise_ me you won't get akumatized. I couldn't bear it."

"It'll be fine," he said, pulling her close. "If I do, Ladybug will just have to save me."

"But what if she can't? What if she fails?" Her voice was small. Careful. Almost as if she didn't even want to speak the words.

"Easy," he said, whispering in her ear. "Then Multimouse will have to save me instead."


End file.
